No CEO alone has the power or means to make chicken salad out of chicken sh**.
I have yet to see anything close to a methodical analysis of what happened at and to HP before, during and after her tenure.
I do know from experience that lots of people, functions, departments in large organizations take on lives of their own.
If she cut obsolete products, and unnecessary staff levels, she did good.
The entire IT business group went through a down cycle.
I expect much of the criticism of her comes from those that were terminated. They don’t write it up and say they were part of divisions and product lines that were growing and profitable.
They don’t really back up their claims against her. I recall a very wise and skilled top executive who laid out his philosophy for overhead costs, thusly: “What are we doing, why are we doing it, and when are we going to stop?”
The people who carry out cost reductions are never popular. I remember streamlining some functions, reducing man-hours, and then being disliked by those who got smaller paychecks due to less overtime.
Please, you really are reaching... What did Carly do? Oh lets see, She decided to buy out Compaq, which was the stupidest move in the world! She made a boneheaded argument that this would somehow make the company stronger, because you know when you are manufacturing a small margin product like PC’s buying out another player making the same small margin product is going to somehow win you economies of scale and save your ass...
It of course didn’t, burned through HP’s cash, causing the cut in R&D to the point of guaranteeing that HP would never innovate again.
She was a train wreck, you need to get your head out of your ass and understand what R&D is to a tech company, the minute you kill R&D you guarantee your company’s future will be lessened... She made bonehead play after bonehead play and because of her complete bonehead actions killed the revenues of the company, its stock value as well, and then when all those chickens came home to roost fired the the folks and department that had built and sustained HP as a market leader and innovator over its entire existence.
HP was not chickenshit when she took control, but she sure made sure it was by the time she was gone... You can read case study after case study about how abysmal her tenure was, and there are 10s of thousands of technical folks who can tell you first hand just how badly she drove that company into the ground.
Her tenure was a disaster, attempting to spin it as not or that she was just a victim of circumstances shows complete ignorance of the entire situation. Carly was an affirmative action hire, who was beyond her depth from the get go. I am sure she tried her best, but her best was not remotely good enough, and to try to argue that what she did to HP was the result of just random happenstance while she held the top chair is beyond ignorant.... or to steal a quote... “requires the willful suspension of disbelief”.